How to Change Voice Characteristics in Eloquence for JAWS, Such as Roughness, Head Size, Inflection and Breathiness, received 2026 02 03

[Colin Howard]

Greetings,

As the original was posted a fair time ago, I wonder if it still works for
Jaws 2024, 5, 6 or any versions as yet not available?

Any experiences would be most welcome, I don't want to risk playing with
.ini files unless somebody with more experience has a go first and reports.

From the Tech-VI list owner:

While JAWS allows you to change the pitch, volume and speech rate of
Eloquence, there are other voice characteristics within Eloquence which JAWS
doesn't allow you to change in its Voice settings dialog. However, by
carefully modifying an .ini file, you can change these settings. Examples
include roughness, breathiness, head size and inflection, the latter being
called pitch fluctuation.

The following message from the JFW list explains how to do this. These
instructions must be followed precisely. Otherwise, your changes either won't
get saved or you could wind up making undesirable changes to your Eloquence
voices. The original poster's advice about making a backup of the original
.ini file should be followed.

I am not able to provide free, individual support on how to accomplish this
and I don't want to be blamed if your changes result in undesirable effects.
Back up the original file before making any changes.

This applies to the Eloquence voices and not to the Vocalizer voices.

The audio file referenced in the original message is no longer available.
Bear in mind that this message was posted a while ago.

I am grateful to Leo Bado for documenting how to do this.

Original Source

Leo Bado

08/22/23 #23403

Hey guys, I found the place where you can change the values of the voice
definition parameters for Eloquence in Jaws! Yes! That's right! You know,
those same parameters that right now are on test in IOS beta. I knew these
parameters are an inbuilt feature, and I didn't rest until I found them,
well, let's not be so dramatic lol.

You may want to carry out all the process by using a vocalizer voice instead
of Eloquence.

First of all, copy and paste the file that contains the values in a safe
location, so that you can use it as a backup in any given scenario. Go to
the following path:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Freedom Scientific\Shared\Eloquence\6.1

Now copy the file "ECI.INI" and put it in a safe location. Notice that in
this folder there are two files with the same name, so make sure you're
saving the right file .ini.

Now, to modify the values contained in ECI.INI you have to launch notepad as
an administrator, press control plus O to open a file in Notepad, and locate
ECI.INI in the explorer. After pushing control plus O though, make sure to
change to "all files" the type of file extensions that you can open with
Notepad, otherwise you won't be able to locate ECI.INI.

Once Notepad opened ECI.INI, push control plus F, and type "enu.syn" without
any quotes, and hit enter. Now push escape to close the dialogue. The
focus of the cursor should have landed on the language-specific parameters
for Eloquence, which in this case is English United States. For English UK,
you should locate the following string:

"eng.syn"

Now hit the home key to get you to the beginning of the line, and start
arrowing down until you find a similar line to this one:

Voice1=0 50 65 30 0 0 50 92

These are actually the values you should modify to change the voice. Notice
that after the = sign there are 8 values separated by a blank space. Those
values correspond respectively to:

Gender

HeadSize

PitchBaseLine

Pitch Fluctuation

Roughness

Breathiness

Speed

Volume

All of them scale from 0 to 100 except for gender. In this case you use 0
for male and 1 for female.

Now, for some reason changes has never a real effect on speed and volume, so
I believe that Jaws is simply overwriting those parameters no matter what
you do, but for what it's worth, modifying the other parameters do have a
real effect.

After performing any change, don't forget to save the document.

You will also notice that there are 8 voices under each language specific
setting, (e.g., voice2, voice3, etc.(. Those alias correspond respectively
to Reed, Shelly, Bobby, Rocko, Glen, Sandy, Grandma and Grandpa. So, when
you modify voice1, you're really modifying Reed and so on and so forth.
Since I always want to have Reed using the default values, but I also
wanted to introduce modifications to use a customized voice to read, I
modified Voice4, namely Rocko, an saved the changes. Then, I created a new
voice profile based on Eloquence, and chose Rocko to be used in all
contexts, PC, Jaws cursor, keyboard, etc. In this way I can have these
other profiles and always come back to Eloquence using the Reed voice by
default.

Best,

Leo Bado

David Goldfield,

Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist

http://www.DavidGoldfield.com

Director of Marketing,

Blazie Technologies

http://www.BlazieTech.com

JAWS Certified, 2022

NVDA Certified Expert

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http://www.DavidGoldfield.com

Colin Howard, living in Southern England.